The absence of archival evidence renders the record of the Surrealist involvement reliant on the autobiographies of author Andre Thirion and Louis Aragon, and they disagree about which of them organised the exhibition.
The Soviet doctrine by 1931 was that art had to be proletarian, expressed as social realism, and that the Surrealist art should conform to this party line. This was anathema to Surrealists, who considered themselves the sole arbiters of what constituted revolutionary art, and rightly deemed Communist functionaries unqualified to pronounce on it.
